Amtrak wants 25Mbps per train

Crowding a single 10Mbps with hundreds of customers is untenable.

Amtrak is looking to build a trackside Wi-Fi network on its Northeast corridor that would bump its trains' connections to broadband-level speeds. The increase is meant to accommodate busy trains with hundreds of customers crowding the Wi-Fi, a common scenario that results in slow or no connections for some customers.

Amtrak has offered Wi-Fi on trains running between Boston and Washington, DC for several years now, but currently, the connection is 10Mbps shared among everyone on the train. In this reporter's experience on crowded trains, this means you can only get on the Wi-Fi long enough to re-establish a connection through the network's dialog boxes before the process resets.

The company has requested proof-of-concept bids to bump the connection speed to 25Mbps per train "to meet growing customer data usage demands." The bids will be used to see if it is "technically and financially feasible" to bring network improvements to the entire stretch of the Northeast corridor.

Amtrak's Wi-Fi improvement project follows that of Gogo's coming improvements to its in-flight Wi-Fi. Gogo announced in September that it would separate its transmissions to use satellites for receiving links and air-to-ground connections for return links, which the company said would bump its speeds from 9.8Mbps per plane to 60Mbps.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

62 Reader Comments

Losing the connection sounds like what it is. If the connection is congested it should just take quite a while to transfer anything. If you are actually losing connectivity then something else is going on.

Now if they could do the same for their extensive railway corridors through the rest of the countr---- oh, wait...

Train ridership is largely a coastal thing. Ridership in the Midwest and elsewhere is largely scenic tourism or a greyhound alternative for major cities, but the trains largely run empty. This gives little incentive to keep them running let alone constantly upgrade them.

Honestly come to think of it I think Greyhound has better ridership from metro to metro than Amtrak.

I love it when people compare countries on how things are done. In the US i doubt even 1/4 of the population has ever taken a train for more than 10 miles in one sitting to travel.

I take this particular line every so often. From the beginning the Wifi was great because very few people had smartphones. Laptops were abundant but to Smartphones really pushed it over the edge.

Now you have smartphones with dataplans competing for the same signal they are using. And people trying to save their dataplan trying to use the wifi. Even with my own cellphone data connection i had trouble down the line.

Losing the connection sounds like what it is. If the connection is congested it should just take quite a while to transfer anything. If you are actually losing connectivity then something else is going on.

Yes and no. If you have a large number of clients sharing a relatively poor, low-bandwidth connection, you can get into a state of essentially endlessly cascading dropped packets, and many browsers' response to this is to assume that the connection is down/broken and time-out. This effect is magnified by the fact that you're constantly hopping cell towers (and thus IP table routes), and since it takes forever to download any individual packet due to network congestion, the odds of you hopping a tower during transmission is very high.

I figured out that they had to be sharing a single cell connection over the entire train when I noticed that their wifi connection completely cuts out at the same time my cellphone would lose all 4G signal.

I don't even bother trying to use the Amtrak wifi any more, it's never worth it even for basic email.

Now if they could do the same for their extensive railway corridors through the rest of the countr---- oh, wait...

Train ridership is largely a coastal thing. Ridership in the Midwest and elsewhere is largely scenic tourism or a greyhound alternative for major cities, but the trains largely run empty. This gives little incentive to keep them running let alone constantly upgrade them.

Honestly come to think of it I think Greyhound has better ridership from metro to metro than Amtrak.

There are quite a few short distance trains that run out of Chicago and do quite well. Wherever they do run, they run quite full.

The Chicago to St. Louis and Chicago to Detroit routes are also being upgraded for 110 MPH service, and a group of midwestern states have gone in together on ordering new railcars and locomotives, so the "empty and not upgraded" stuff just isn't true.

Losing the connection sounds like what it is. If the connection is congested it should just take quite a while to transfer anything. If you are actually losing connectivity then something else is going on.

Yes and no. If you have a large number of clients sharing a relatively poor, low-bandwidth connection, you can get into a state of essentially endlessly cascading dropped packets, and many browsers' response to this is to assume that the connection is down/broken and time-out. This effect is magnified by the fact that you're constantly hopping cell towers (and thus IP table routes), and since it takes forever to download any individual packet due to network congestion, the odds of you hopping a tower during transmission is very high.

This is the point I was going to make. With a connection that overloaded both in terms of bandwidth available and number of clients you could easily be in a situation where virtually all the bandwidth is consumed by collisions and retransmission. This can happen both at the WIFI level with multiple devices trying to "talk" at the same time triggering a retransmission and at the TCP/IP level with it deciding the packet has been lost because it hasn't received it's ACK and trying to retransmit it.

To resolve this they need to do the same types of things they do in any crowded situation where they want to provide wifi such as a stadium or conference center.

1) Deploy more access points with smaller coverage to break your users into smaller group.2) Manage those access points to coordinate the channels to minimize interference.

Both those things are much easier when using 5ghz for N, especially when it's in addition to 2.4ghz.

With that done then they can work on improving their connection between the train and the internet.

Bear in mind Amtrak is basically tiny as *passenger* train networks go (freight is another matter). It dosn't handle the sort of commuter rail which is the backbone of other countries passenger rail services.

It has ~85,450 people travelling per day. 51,000km of track.

i.e. In GB (not even including Northern Ireland) which is ~2.4% of the land area, has ~3.65 (or another source says 4.1) MILLION people travelling per day and 15,750km of track.

(And we're well off the top...)

It's not going to have the same kind of investment, because basically it's the headline, marginally-profitable bit of the railway network.

(For reference, local rail carries about 1.2 million people per day in the US, which is still pretty low for the size...)

Now if they could do the same for their extensive railway corridors through the rest of the countr---- oh, wait...

Yes, let's expand the business that is currently hemorrhaging money. I like Amtrak, but some of the lines I've ridden on midday trains outside of the major corridors that were nearly empty. Something is wrong with their business model and they should figure this out before they go begging for more government money. Considering that the DC-Boston lines are their most expensive (exorbitantly so, $100 for an 1.25 hour trip between Philly and NY!), they should be bending over backwards to make these trains as business friendly as possible.

I love it when people compare countries on how things are done. In the US i doubt even 1/4 of the population has ever taken a train for more than 10 miles in one sitting to travel.

I take this particular line every so often. From the beginning the Wifi was great because very few people had smartphones. Laptops were abundant but to Smartphones really pushed it over the edge.

Now you have smartphones with dataplans competing for the same signal they are using. And people trying to save their dataplan trying to use the wifi. Even with my own cellphone data connection i had trouble down the line.

I'm taking a trip next week from the midwest to the northeast. I hate going through TSA, so unless I'm in a big damn hurry, I'd much rather take a train. The lack of wifi has been a serious issue, though, which is why I make sure I have several offline available games and audiobooks available for the trip. Which reminds me, I should download some new books.

I'm willing to bet outdated Wi-Fi equipment onboard is a major contributor to the connection problems. If the access points don't support some sort of MIMO system, or there aren't enough points in the first place, it doesn't matter big the pipe is, you're competing for limited wifi space.

Wouldn't there be a way to limit each user ? If everybody could at least get something halfway usable, that would seem better than trying to give something great, but, in fact, nobody getting anything. Some sort of benevolent deal, where they ask people to avoid youtube, that seems like a request that is destined to fail. They need to force it.

I would be curious about other technologies for the trains. I mean, They are on these big metal rails...

I wonder if it would be possible to do the equivelent of powerline networking over the rails to the trains. Just how noisy is the environment, how long a distance, boosting along the way, etc, etc.

I mean, it wouldn't be that prohibitive in cost if you could get away with a repeater every couple of miles along the tracks with a fixed high gain wifi antenna back to a base station (or other backhaul, like 900MHz or something).

I would be curious about other technologies for the trains. I mean, They are on these big metal rails...

I wonder if it would be possible to do the equivelent of powerline networking over the rails to the trains. Just how noisy is the environment, how long a distance, boosting along the way, etc, etc.

I mean, it wouldn't be that prohibitive in cost if you could get away with a repeater every couple of miles along the tracks with a fixed high gain wifi antenna back to a base station (or other backhaul, like 900MHz or something).

If you go out and look at railroad tracks you will notice that they are laid down in segments, and each segment has a gap between them. This is why you get the "tick-tick" of wheels as the train is moving. The reason for this is that metal expands when it heats up, and without the gaps the rails would buckle on hot days.

That said, you can run cables along railway lines. That is how Sprint (Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network) got started. Making the connection to the moving train however is the difficult part. You could setup microcells or 802.11 base stations with beam forming antennas, but both would require thousands of installations and cost a fortune. Plus they would have the technical challenge of handling constant handoffs as the train speeds by.

Back in the real world, I think a good interim solution would be to beef up the access points on the train itself. Include a webcache service and try to proxy as much of the traffic as possible. Then. meter out the connections so they don't over-saturate the cell link and cause the system to buckle from the strain. Maybe even consider active throttling that slows down any one client that tries to push too much data while giving priority to clients that are otherwise largely idle. This is a fairly complex system, but it could massively improve the quality of the experience without requiring quite such a massive backend overhaul. It could be as simple as a single box dropped between the access points and the Cell modem.

If you go out and look at railroad tracks you will notice that they are laid down in segments, and each segment has a gap between them. This is why you get the "tick-tick" of wheels as the train is moving. The reason for this is that metal expands when it heats up, and without the gaps the rails would buckle on hot days.

Having grown up in the U.S., that tick-tick you speak of, I know it well. But for the last 16 years, I have been living in France, and I can tell you, the trains don't go tick-tick in France. The fast TGV trains don't, nor do the slower trains. Somehow they manage to get around this issue, "expands when it heats up", without the tick-ticks.

If you go out and look at railroad tracks you will notice that they are laid down in segments, and each segment has a gap between them. This is why you get the "tick-tick" of wheels as the train is moving. The reason for this is that metal expands when it heats up, and without the gaps the rails would buckle on hot days.

Having grown up in the U.S., that tick-tick you speak of, I know it well. But for the last 16 years, I have been living in France, and I can tell you, the trains don't go tick-tick in France. The fast TGV trains don't, nor do the slower trains. Somehow they manage to get around this issue, "expands when it heats up", without the tick-ticks.

It could be better sound isolation as well or simply better maintenance of the track. I would imagine tracks would have to be laid out in segments anyways simply because it's impossible to do otherwise. Rail tracks don't come in km long pieces after all.

In the US our railways are primarily used for freight transport and it's typically both owned by shipping companies and shared with passenger traffic. Freight traffic doesn't need high quality rail for the slow speeds they travel. This leads in many cases to companies reducing max rail speed before actually improving the track.

Naturally this results in Amtrak having to slow down their trains as well, and the lower quality rail causing the tick-tack issue commonly associated with passenger transport in the US.

TL;DR different priorities for track between countries. US rail is dominated by freight leading to low quality track. European railways are primarily used for passenger transport.

I ride Amtrak pretty regularly on the northeast corridor. WiFi speeds are so terrible that I usually end up just using the 4G connection on my phone to do work. I don't have a problem with that.

Rather than spending the money on a minuscule upgrade (2.5x of a slow connection is still a slow connection), I'd rather them spend the money to straighten rails, buy some dedicated rails so that it's not constantly delayed by freight rails, etc.

Train ridership is largely a coastal thing. Ridership in the Midwest and elsewhere is largely scenic tourism or a greyhound alternative for major cities, but the trains largely run empty. This gives little incentive to keep them running let alone constantly upgrade them.

Honestly come to think of it I think Greyhound has better ridership from metro to metro than Amtrak.

My mother in law rides the train from North Dakota to Minneapolis and she says that the train is quite full most of the time.

I would be curious about other technologies for the trains. I mean, They are on these big metal rails...

I wonder if it would be possible to do the equivelent of powerline networking over the rails to the trains. Just how noisy is the environment, how long a distance, boosting along the way, etc, etc.

I mean, it wouldn't be that prohibitive in cost if you could get away with a repeater every couple of miles along the tracks with a fixed high gain wifi antenna back to a base station (or other backhaul, like 900MHz or something).

If you go out and look at railroad tracks you will notice that they are laid down in segments, and each segment has a gap between them. This is why you get the "tick-tick" of wheels as the train is moving. The reason for this is that metal expands when it heats up, and without the gaps the rails would buckle on hot days. I think you have to have welded tracks on really fast trains.

That said, you can run cables along railway lines. That is how Sprint (Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network) got started. Making the connection to the moving train however is the difficult part. You could setup microcells or 802.11 base stations with beam forming antennas, but both would require thousands of installations and cost a fortune. Plus they would have the technical challenge of handling constant handoffs as the train speeds by.

Back in the real world, I think a good interim solution would be to beef up the access points on the train itself. Include a webcache service and try to proxy as much of the traffic as possible. Then. meter out the connections so they don't over-saturate the cell link and cause the system to buckle from the strain. Maybe even consider active throttling that slows down any one client that tries to push too much data while giving priority to clients that are otherwise largely idle. This is a fairly complex system, but it could massively improve the quality of the experience without requiring quite such a massive backend overhaul. It could be as simple as a single box dropped between the access points and the Cell modem.

I wonder about the gap between rails. I thought it was just about price. It is easier to just bolt rails together rather than welding them, as they do in most of Europe (where you don't hear the tick-tick). What happens to European tracks on hot days?

Considering several posters here can't connect to Amtrak's WiFi, but can use a tether data service of their cell phone while on the train suggests that the problem is already solved, just not implemented by Amtrak.

Hearing about welded rail made me go and look up how the avoid the buckling issue. Apparently they do it by heating the rail during install, welding it in place, then fastening it to the sleepers (the ties) before the rail cools, causing it to always be in tension except on really hot days. I'm not sure how they prevent it from cracking when it cools or pulling sleepers to the side in turns, but that's really interesting.

If you go out and look at railroad tracks you will notice that they are laid down in segments, and each segment has a gap between them. This is why you get the "tick-tick" of wheels as the train is moving. The reason for this is that metal expands when it heats up, and without the gaps the rails would buckle on hot days.

Having grown up in the U.S., that tick-tick you speak of, I know it well. But for the last 16 years, I have been living in France, and I can tell you, the trains don't go tick-tick in France. The fast TGV trains don't, nor do the slower trains. Somehow they manage to get around this issue, "expands when it heats up", without the tick-ticks.

It could be better sound isolation as well or simply better maintenance of the track. I would imagine tracks would have to be laid out in segments anyways simply because it's impossible to do otherwise. Rail tracks don't come in km long pieces after all.

No, it comes from the vast majority of the rail being km-long pieces of welded rail, laid down in tension as mentioned above.

Stick rail is still around in little used branch lines, but the vast majority of the mainline track that Amtrak operates over (and most freight goes over) are welded rail.

Losing the connection sounds like what it is. If the connection is congested it should just take quite a while to transfer anything. If you are actually losing connectivity then something else is going on.

Yes and no. If you have a large number of clients sharing a relatively poor, low-bandwidth connection, you can get into a state of essentially endlessly cascading dropped packets, and many browsers' response to this is to assume that the connection is down/broken and time-out. This effect is magnified by the fact that you're constantly hopping cell towers (and thus IP table routes), and since it takes forever to download any individual packet due to network congestion, the odds of you hopping a tower during transmission is very high.

That is a good point. If the timeout values for each application are exceeded then it will effectively look like a dropped connection. I wonder if wireless connection managers such as what is built into Windows and Macintosh would be affected the same way that a browser is?

I ride Amtrak daily. Yes, the Wi-Fi can be spotty, so I tend to use my phone a bit more than I would otherwise.

It's easy to mock them for just reaching for 25Mbps, but the truth is that you don't need crazy speeds to do e-mail and surfing... which is what the majority of folks on the train are doing... especially those that are commuting in the Northeast Corridor (and the other commuter lines like Capital Corridor here in the bay).

I agree with others that some improvements to the on-train infrastructure would give a bit of relief, and should be something that could be worked out prior, or concurrent, to the proposed internet connection upgrade.

My mother in law rides the train from North Dakota to Minneapolis and she says that the train is quite full most of the time.

That route is known as the "Empire Builder", and that Amtrak train is one of the more popular long-haul trains Amtrak provides their customers. Unless something has changed recently, Amtrak does *not* offer wifi on that train.

The tracks in that area (ND->Minneapolis) are owned by Burlington Northern Santa Fe. (aka "The railroad that Warren Buffet owns") Much of that route is "single-tracked", so not much passing can happen. However, with the explosion of Natural Gas found in the North Dakota area, plus all of the food from the farmers (Idaho, Montana, North Dakota) trying to ship their food east has severely constrained the capacity of the line. At certain times, up to 30 trains are waiting to be dispatched through some of the single track areas. Needless to say, this often causes lots of Empire Builder train delays.

Embarrassing really that it took them this long and they're seriously only upgrading to 25mbit/s.

I've been on trains in Europe where I could watch youtube videos on a full train without any problems - I don't really understand what's so complicated about this..

I've been on international trains in Europe with no wifi whatsoever, or wifi so slow it was absolutely unusable.

Well you have to know which trains to pick. Also France is generally horrible in that regard. Try Germany or Austria.

And well you only need a single good example to prove that we have the technology to make this work and considering how expensive upgrades are, doing it once reasonably well and future proof seems much better than such a bandaid solution.

I mean 25mbit for a full train isn't going to cut it either. I can only speak for NYC <-> Boston but the train was always rather full when I took it and 25mbit/s are good for how many people? 100 at most?

It's not something that's even worth discussing. The solution is to sell it off to private business and let the free market do its thing. Amtrak is massive government pork: $1.5B a year in American taxpayer subsidies flushed down the drain...and that probably doesn't include massive unfunded pension liabilities. Then you look at the disaster in California to build a $100B track in the desert, may as well just start burning people's money in the streets.